It’s not easy being the Rotterdam Film Festival, but I’m glad it exists. The Dutch festival is always going to find it hard to compete with Berlin and Cannes, its closest rivals on the calendar.
Rotterdam runs from late January to early February, but it’s Berlin, which happens just after, that is seen as kicking off the film festival season for the year. And the Germans probably feel similarly uncomfortable in regard to Cannes – not helped by the way they have recently cycled through festival directors and been prey to political controversy when it comes to the stance they’ve taken on Gaza.
I’ve been going to the International Rotterdam Film Festival for the last three years. It offers a good catch-up for films I’ve not seen at other festivals in its Limelight section, as well as some great picks in its main programme.
During the opening ceremony this year, festival director Vanja Kaludjercic explicitly championed cinema as an antidote to the pile-up of crises which we are experiencing and, I would argue, we have been experiencing for roughly a decade: Brexit, the Trump presidencies, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 massacre and the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
Vanja might not have mentioned all of these, but that was the gist. Cinema helps us collaborate and understand a world which is increasingly fractured and isolated.
I’m never sure about this kind of pro-cinema propaganda. It comes from the world and is part of the world which is criticised. We can have anti-racist films, and racist films: sometimes the same film can be both: see Green Book (2018). And many films pass through the consciousness like neutrinos, leaving no trace whatsoever.
The opening film, for instance, Providence and the Guitar is the kind of pleasant enough arthouse fare which will meander through festivals without ever disturbing the wider culture. In a sense the film itself is about art for art’s sake as actor and playwright couple León (Pedro Inês) and Elvira (Clara Riedenstein), sojourn in a 19th-century Portuguese village and struggle to get paid for their elaborate shows.
Joåo Nicolau’s film is about believing in yourself even if you’re not very good and features a flash-forward to present day Lisbon in which a punk band is about to break up. It’s affable, but – like so many films in the festival circuit – is way too long.
But, as Bing Crosby once sang: I’m going to accentuate the positive. IFFR screened 428 features and shorts in its ten-day run. Between trips to a fantastic ramen restaurant and shivering in the freezing weather, I had the pleasure of visiting the wonderful Cinerama and Kino cinemas, as well as the IMAX multiplex.
I greatly enjoyed Chronovisor, directed by Kevin Walker and Jack Auen. A strange tale, inspired by the work of Jorge Louis Borges and Umberto Eco, it follows the investigations of an archivist into a machine which allows viewers to see into the past.
Most of the film is taken up with reading texts from magazines and books, gossip rags, academic treatises, all of which are highlighted on the screen as we build up an eerie sense of foreboding as the Vatican and various shady characters get involved, all to the sound of Holst’s Planets, well Planet (Saturn), on the soundtrack. It’s like looking over Morgan Freeman’s shoulder as he researches the seven deadly sins in Se7en, but then the last act pays off splendidly.
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A more in-your-face (or up your bum) genre piece came with Bowels of Hell, a Brazilian horror comedy about a demonic toilet directed by Gustavo Vinagre and Gurcius Gewdner, which is shitty but in a good way. More John Waters than Brian Yuzna, the filmmakers pull off quite the trick by actually having quite a lot to say about gender identity and grief while still delivering on plop jokes and gross-out deaths.
Ivo M. Ferreira’s Portuguese retrothriller Projecto Global portrays the terrorist activities of a far left group in the 1980s. Believing the 1975 Carnation Revolution to have failed, Rosa (Jani Zhao) and her FP-25 group of radicals set about bombing, assassinating and robbing banks to fund their activities.
The film stands as something of a corrective to the overly rosy view of left wing violence propagated by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. There’s plenty of revolutionary chic here, a great soundtrack, and all those period trappings of heavy telephone and constant smoking, but ultimately this is a film about the self-lacerating nature of political violence that has become disconnected from the people it purports to be helping.
The film which claimed the top prize was Variations on a Theme, a surprisingly modest South African drama about an 80-year-old goat farmer Hettie, caught out by a scam that promises to pay her compensation for her father’s war service – he fought in the second world war and was paid off with a bicycle and a pair of leather boots.
It’s one of those films that is determinedly local, seeing in the corner of the world a bend on the road to nowhere, the whole universe and all its drama. Writer/director team Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar delve into the dreams and disappointments of the community, gaining an intimacy via Jacobs’ voiceover, which seems to have access to the innermost thoughts of the villagers.
The 55th International Film Festival of Rotterdam ran from 29 January to 8 February, 2026.
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